Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha (22 page)

Two and a half minutes was a long time, she noticed, seeing how slowly the second hand on her watch crept around the dial, but if the signal could last for two and a half minutes it would be heard and they could be traced and located.

“What is it?” asked Detwiler, seeing the frown on her face.

She said softly, “The radio …”

“What about it?”

She turned her face toward him, “I’ve been thinking that if I could crawl over to it, and if the transmitters were turned on for two and a half minutes—”

He scowled, not understanding. “What would that do? Who would hear?”

She said simply, “It would be heard. A great deal has been happening, there are people—people hoping the radio may be used.”

His eyes widened. “You mean
—others?
People
know?
”

“Yes—but not when,” she told him. “Your papers—the plans you hid in the Buddha—are in good hands. So if I can get to the radio—I must ask, if the men should move away from the window could you possibly manage to create a diversion? The switch would have to—
must—
remain open for two and a half minutes.”

He was silent, his face thoughtful, and she thought that for the first time since she’d come here he looked like the Detwiler she’d met on Monday.

“No,” he said at last.

Her consternation, her sense of betrayal, were like a stab opening up wounds again. “You won’t
help?
”

“No,” he said softly, “I mean that I will go to the
radio, not you.” He turned to look at her. “You must-allow this.” A curious little smile twisted his lips. “I’ve been of little use, and—I’m quite addicted, you know. Allow me to feel—be—a human being again.”

“But—”

He touched her bound hands with his. “It’s all right, you know—it’s all right. It’s the switch on the left side?”

She nodded, “Flip it on and come back.” Something about him worried her. “Come back and we’ll time it together.”

He smiled faintly, nodded, and rolling himself to his knees he tipped forward and began to crawl awkwardly down the aisle. The men beyond were still occupied at the window, and when one did turn away to collect an additional box it was to another aisle that he went; Mr. Detwiler remained unseen.

As he came to a stop under the radio Mrs. Pollifax tensed: this was the dangerous moment, when he would have to struggle to his feet, stand upright and lean over the crate to flick on the switch. She waited, holding her breath. Pulling himself into a kneeling position Detwiler glanced back at her once and she saw that he was asking for a signal. Backs were still turned; she nodded vigorously, watched him place his weight on one leg, stand, lean over and push on the switch.

“Beautiful—oh, you dear man,”
whispered Mrs. Pollifax, and drew an exultant breath of relief. As he sank back to the floor out of sight she lifted her tied hands to consult her watch and to mark the second hand: it was precisely six-twenty-nine … except—
Oh, God
, she thought, seeing how slowly the second hand moved,
it’s going to take so long and how many times must the second hand crawl past the hour to two and a half minutes … 150 times?

Four seconds
, she whispered, counting.
Five … eight … nine seconds …

Detwiler was not returning. Snatching a quick glance at him she saw only his back as he crouched under the radio, hut she could give him no more attention and her eyes fled back to the second hand’s movements on her watch.
Fifty seconds … sixty … one minute!

One minute and three seconds. One minute and five seconds … eight … nine …

How astonishing time was, she thought, how arduous just one second, did people
know
this?

One minute and fifty seconds … fifty-eight. Two minutes—the transmitter had been sending out its signal for two minutes.

Two minutes and one second … and now Mrs. Pollifax allowed herself to hope … allowed herself to think of two men in a radio-detection van furiously turning those coordinates that Marko had described, their optimism mounting in tune with hers if only … if only …

Two minutes and twenty seconds—please, please, she whispered; two minutes and twenty-five seconds … twenty-six … twenty-nine … thirty seconds.

Two minutes and a half!

She felt a rush of joy and longed to call out to Detwiler that he’d done it, that the radio had remained on for two and a half minutes.

The switch was still on, the time was reaching two minutes and fifty-eight seconds … fifty-nine … almost three minutes.

A sudden shout interrupted her vigil and she lifted her eyes from her watch.
“Oh no,”
she gasped, crying the words out loud as she saw the man standing over Detwiler and staring down at him in disbelief; she saw comprehension
dawn on the man’s face, saw the switch furiously snapped off and others come to stand over Detwiler, and then the gun drawn out of the gun belt.

She closed her eyes as they shot him. When she opened them Detwiler was dead, sprawled lifeless on the floor beside the crate, his eyes open and staring sightlessly down the aisle toward her.

S
taring at Detwiler’s body sprawled across the floor Mrs. Pollifax thought dazedly,
He knew this could happen, it’s what he was trying to tell me, that he couldn’t find a future for himself, there was no going back …

Poor Mrs. O’Malley
, she thought.

And then she remembered that it was an incredible act of gallantry on Detwiler’s part, because it was she who had been going to crawl to the radio but he’d insisted on doing it instead, and at this she lifted her bound wrists to clumsily wipe away her tears.

Beside her Alec Hao suddenly sat up, jarred out of his sleep. “What is it?” he said sharply. “What’s happened?”

She nodded toward Detwiler. “They’ve shot him.”

He glanced down the aisle and then he turned to stare at her. “Is he dead? It’s you I thought they’d killed, I didn’t expect—”

“I know,” she said.

Alec was shivering. “Are we next? Doesn’t this ever end?”

She had watched the window being replaced and now she braced herself as Eric the Red strode down the aisle to the two of them and said curtly, “Up—on your feet, we’re leaving.”

She thought,
Well, Emily, this is when you find out what all those years of orange juice and vitamin pills can do for you … What you may want is a soft bed, hot food and a great deal of nurturing, but what you’re stuck with is leaving this blessed wonderful floor and walking downstairs
.

It was Alec who helped her to her feet, which was generous of him, she thought, not realizing that as she’d leaned forward he’d seen her bloody back. Stumbling a little, she found that if she concentrated on Detwiler’s final act of courage she could ignore the pain of her shirt tugging at her tender back. Step by step she followed Eric the Red down the stairs, and when she faltered Alec steadied her from behind.

The blue wooden door was open and she saw the van waiting in this other alley, the alley to which she’d been delivered by Mr. Feng an eternity ago. It was a surprisingly innocent-looking van, a shabby Volkswagen camper with what looked like baggage strapped on its roof and covered with a tarpaulin, and
—Oh what a clever touch
, she thought bitterly—two bicycles mounted at the back. Only the two rear windows were curtained, the others open to the world as if to emphasize there being nothing to hide, except that as she entered the van Mrs. Pollifax noticed what was hidden in the curtained rear: piles of machine guns, net bags through which could be seen tins of food, and crates marked AMMO.

But where was the radio-detection van?

She reminded herself that she was still alive and was apparently to be a hostage and to go on living a little longer—if no one grew nervous, if all went well—and now she applied herself to sitting down next to the un-curtained front window without her back touching the rear of the seat. But where was the radio-detection van?

Beside her Alec said softly, “Sunshine … I didn’t think I’d ever see it again.”

“No,” she said, remembering that for him it had been three days. She looked carefully down at her wristwatch and saw that it was six fifty-five, or roughly twenty-three minutes since Detwiler’s signal had been cut off, and she thought,
Surely this was time enough?
And then in a sudden panic she wondered if the men in the radio-detection van had stopped cruising the streets, had given up, or had perhaps taken a ten-minute break at half-past six. Detwiler had given his life for those two and a half minutes and she was appalled as she wondered if she had counted the seconds properly, if Marko had erred, if new equipment had been developed that protected these men against such a long radio signal.

She was shaken by these doubts and weakened from her walk down the stairs; the reserves of energy that she’d summoned were slipping away from her, and this too appalled her.

Others entered the van now, six men in all, and while Carl took the wheel the others arranged themselves out of sight in the rear. The van backed out of the alley and Mrs. Pollifax stared into narrow streets filled with people going to work, at barrows being wheeled along the crowded sidewalks, and two ancient men defying the streams of people by playing mah jong at a table under an awning: it was the beginning of Friday.

But she could see nothing on the street that resembled a radio-detection van, or for that matter any van at all.

Something had gone wrong, then—horribly and terribly wrong—and she felt the weight of it crush her spirit. She wondered if she could bear it. She had already exacted her last reserves of strength in walking down the stairs to the alley, and now her body was exacting its own price by supplanting hope with hopelessness; she realized that she had an overwhelming desire to cry.

From the back of the van came the sputtering of a radio and Eric the Red speaking in a low voice; she caught the words
coffee shop third floor
, and
take them to the top
and then,
about eight minutes now
. She realized that an advance party of terrorists must have already seized the tower and have found hostages. Hopeless, all of it—too late, too late … She closed her eyes to escape the unfeeling world outside and dreamily thought of home, of Mr. Lupalak, who might or might not have installed the bay window off-center, and then of Mr. Hitchens and his Learning Experiences; would he call this a Learning Experience?

When she opened her eyes they were on Peak Road, climbing now and moving at a moderate speed, a shabby camper with a woman at one window, bicycles mounted on the rear, luggage on the roof … the “luggage” that would be the multiple rocket launcher Robin had mentioned and that Mr. Hitchens had described, and for just a moment she gazed down at the harbor below and wondered what Robin and Marko were doing.
Sleeping, of course
, she thought, since it was scarcely 7
A.M.
, at which she felt acutely lonely and bereft.

The tower could be glimpsed now above the trees with its circular restaurant at the top that looked so much
like a space capsule; the radio had gone silent and there was a feeling of mounting tension in the van. Her own tension was mounting, too, because once they reached the peak she would have to walk again, and she was remembering how casually these people killed.

Beside her Alec said weakly, “I can’t stand it, this going on and on, not knowing—I don’t think I can stand much more of it.”

She realized that she could still be useful and comfort him, that there was sanity in doing this. With her bound hands she reached over and touched his arm. “I think,” she whispered, and faltered. “I think,” she said more resolutely, “that one
has
to go on—and on—and on.”

Her words seemed to come to her from a great distance, echoing through caverns and valleys. Deep down she could feel the oppression of her own defeat, her own giving-upness, which was—she knew—compounded of the abuse her body had taken as well as sleeplessness, shock, hunger, the horror of Mr. Detwiler’s death but worst of all his radio signal gone unheard. There was no longer anything she could do and now she was becoming incapable of feeling and even of thinking.

Something’s happening to my mind
, she thought, and found that she didn’t care; if this were madness it at least promised a comfort that removed her from the reality she was meeting now. The van had drawn into the parking lot of the tower and its engine died. There were other cars parked there, the occupants hostage now, she supposed, and the grounds were deserted except for a solitary gardener, a young Chinese, patiently pruning rosebushes at a distance. She could hear the terrorists murmuring over the weapons they were collecting from the rear and then, “Out,” said Carl, and she looked up to see him with a machine gun slung over one shoulder,
grenades hanging from his belt and a pistol leveled at the two of them.

Drearily she arose, back in nightmare again, and she and Alec stumbled down from the van to begin the walk to the tower, the men behind them relaxed and chattering. An abrupt movement off to her left startled Mrs. Pollifax into lifting her head but it was only the gardener moving to another rosebush and dragging his sack behind him. She wanted to scream at him,
Fool—can’t you see the guns, don’t you realize all of Hong Kong’s about to be taken hostage?
But she remembered the world had its own way of going on and on, and there would always be gardeners trimming shrubbery and blind to catastrophe.

Except … except it was strange, she thought, how very closely the gardener had resembled Sheng Ti.

I’m hallucinating now, of course
, she thought,
because Sheng Ti is down in the city and Sheng Ti is not a gardener
 … Horrified at what was happening to her increasingly blurred mind, she looked away before the young gardener could turn into Robin or Marko, or even Cyrus.

They entered the tower, walking into a cheerless concrete hall, damp and cold from the night, with several shallow puddles of water lying on the floor. Dully she thought,
Abandon hope all ye who enter here
 … The bank of elevators lay to their right and she stoically turned to the right, following the man in the lead. Ahead of them a man was standing in the hall waiting patiently for an elevator to arrive, and it did not surprise her at all that he looked exactly like Cyrus because this had to be what madness was like, this peopling the world with familiar faces.